den, and
christened after my parts. A silver birch was Iolanthe, a maple Portia,
an oak Mabel Vane. Through their kind offices many a stranger found it
easy to follow the intricacies of the famous Maze. It was a fine life
for them, surely, this unrestricted running to and fro in the gardens,
with the great Palace as a civilizing influence!

It was for their sake that I was most glad of my increasing prosperity
in my profession. My engagement with the Bancrofts was exchanged at the
close of the summer season of 1876 for an even more popular one with Mr.
John Hare at the Court Theater, Sloane Square.

I had learned a great deal at the Prince of Wales's, notably that the
art of playing in modern plays in a tiny theater was quite different
from the art of playing in the classics in a big theater. The methods
for big and little theaters are alike, yet quite unlike. I had learned
breadth in Shakespeare at the Princess's, and had had to employ it again
in romantic plays for Charles Reade. The pit and gallery were the
audience which we had to reach. At the Prince of Wales's I had to adopt
a more delicate, more subtle, more intimate style. But the breadth had
to be there just the same--as seen through the wrong end of the
microscope. In acting one must possess great strength before one can be
delicate in the right way. Too often weakness is mistaken for delicacy.

Mr. Hare was one of the best stage managers that I have met during the
whole of my long experience in the theater. He was snappy in manner,
extremely irritable if anything went wrong, but he knew what he wanted,
and he got it. No one has ever surpassed him in the securing of a
perfect _ensemble_. He was the Meissonier among the theater artists.
Very likely he would have failed if he had been called upon to produce
"King John," but what better witness to his talent than that he knew his
line and stuck to it?

The members of his company were his, body and soul, while they were
rehearsing. He gave them fifteen minutes for lunch, and any actor or
actress who was foolish or unlucky enough to be a minute late, was sorry
afterwards. Mr. Hare was peppery and irascible, and lost his temper
easily.

Personally, I always got on well with my new manager, and I ought to be
grateful to him, if only because he gave me the second great opportunity
of my career--the part of Olivia in Wills's play from "The Vicar of
Wakefield." During this engagement at the Court I married again. I